karzeem

41 ms·

361.
by karzeem 19y ago
On vacation in Lebanon three years ago, I learned that this same thing is routine over there too. People work out systems about what one missed call means as compared to two, and so on. Funnily enough, a missed call probably conveys just
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by karzeem 19y ago
Actually, many markets that only use play money still work quite well, the Hollywood Stock Exchange being one prominent example. An active market could be great with real money, though. I haven't heard any examples of someone making a huge
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by karzeem 19y ago
Drug companies have been advertising this way to doctors for years. They often hold lectures and give out educational tchotchkes that many doctors find genuinely useful. In fact, drug company lectures and educational materials are the mai
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by karzeem 19y ago
Yeah, that's a great parallel to draw. In comedy, and writing in general, subconscious plagarism can be a big problem. Sometimes I get very proud of myself for coming up with a clever turn of phrase, only to remember that I read it somewh
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by karzeem 19y ago
So the study concludes that eldest children turn out smart, as do those who are the youngest by a large margin. One more example of middle children never catching a break. (Full disclosure: I'm the eldest in my family).
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by karzeem 19y ago
When people pay for music, they're paying for the convenience of the delivery, not for the music itself. For the average user, it's worth a dollar to avoid the relatively clunky wilderness of Limewire and BitTorrent.
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by karzeem 19y ago
There are definitely people out there who cannot stand New York for a minute. These are the people who associate it much more with the city of Taxi Driver and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles than the one of Annie Hall .
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by karzeem 19y ago
Young people are doing a lot of stuff that could one day be considered "enterprise" software; it's just that the suits that buy these things don't trust them yet. PG mentions this in his essay on colleges ( http://www.paulgraham.com/college
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by karzeem 19y ago
Do you know how YouTube filtered adult content from early on? They were always extremely effective, so it would be interesting to know how much time they spent on it.
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by karzeem 19y ago
People need private space (i.e. personal territory) at least some of the time, and the biggest problem with the cubicle is that there is never any real privacy. It's telling that before he died, the guy who invented cubicles went on record
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How Magicians Protect Their Tricks -- One Take on IP of Ideas(slate.com)
7 points by karzeem 19y ago|2 comments
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by karzeem 19y ago
HowStuffWorks was probably the site I visited most through middle school and a good bit of high school. Wikipedia has largely replaced it, at least in my experience. Considering they raised $120 million in VC, is a $250 million acquistion
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by karzeem 19y ago
Sad but true. Most of the time, that comes from people forgetting that good design subsumes usability. If a design doesn't score high marks on usability, it's a bad design, irrespective of how it looks.
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by karzeem 19y ago
Not a bad read, but his words aren't chosen terribly well--he comes off as suggesting that flipping comes before building. Even setting yourself up for an early acquisition takes a lot of work and a pretty good-sized chunk of time (e.g. re
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by karzeem 19y ago
Let me clarify, since a few people are misinterpreting slightly. YC is certainly very helpful, and that's why we're all applying. Being accepted undoubtedly helps a startup's chances for success. So let me append to "for a team to be acc
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by karzeem 19y ago
That's definitely the reason we applied. When they came out, reviews of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan said wisely that for people who want to get into scalable jobs^, the main lesson of the books is to expose yourself to as m
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The Irony of Applying to YC
27 points by karzeem 19y ago|23 comments
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by karzeem 19y ago
PG's point about non-Silicon Valley VCs not knowing their stuff as well is a good one, but your point helps bolster the other side of the argument. New York may be underrated as a startup hub, for the reason you cite. According to Wikipedi
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by karzeem 19y ago
Josh Kopelman posted an interesting, similar article from the WSJ a couple weeks ago: "How many of the top 20 visited Web sites of August 2003 are still in that ranking? Nine" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59361
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Nothing Says "Buy" Like "Free Shipping"(nytimes.com)
1 points by karzeem 19y ago|0 comments
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by karzeem 19y ago
You're right. Funny how the Florida theme parks of one's youth tend to blend together. Slate has a good (though somewhat old) explanation of both Universal and Disney's systems ( http://www.slate.com/id/2067672/sidebar/2067676/ ). If its
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by karzeem 19y ago
If you stay in one of the Disney-owned hotels, you get to skip the lines on all the rides. It's a little more expensive, but it's worth it, since you wait five minutes, tops, for any ride.
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The Highlights and Lowlights of Usability in the World of Open-Source Software(humanized.com)
2 points by karzeem 19y ago|0 comments
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by karzeem 19y ago
Well, if nothing else, it would probably be one of the weirdest applications YC has ever gotten.
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by karzeem 19y ago
"Wars are always about population pressure and competition for resources." Often, but not always. The security dilemma is another major cause of wars.
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by karzeem 19y ago
It's surprising that it's taken until now for a formal way to flame people to pop up. You're probably right that most of their visitors will be of the one-time variety. If it keeps going, my guess is the audience will be fairly small exce
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by karzeem 19y ago
A good analogy is a comparison between a Honda Civic and a Lamborghini. Driving the Civic is predictable and undemanding, and it gets the job done decently. The Lamborghini is less forgiving and asks more of its driver, but used well will
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by karzeem 19y ago
You've stumbled onto a pet obsession of mine, so I'm compelled to comment. This isn't hacking-related, so apologies in advance. The most important element of a good shave is by no means the razor--it's wetness. If you start using a shavin
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by karzeem 19y ago
Depends what you mean by slant. Fox News slant is bad, Slate slant is good. The measure isn't whether the slant is in a particular political direction--it's intellectual honesty and quality of reasoning. For that reason, pulling off a sl
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by karzeem 19y ago
For hiring in the U.S., discrimination is legal if it's done on the basis of what are called "bona fide occupational qualifications". This is the legal principle that allows, say, police departments to reject people who don't meet physical

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